


Life As We Know It

by Milieu



Series: Urban Decay [2]
Category: Bandom, Black Veil Brides
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Gen, Horror, Isolation, Psychological Trauma, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-03-07 09:21:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,030
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3169646
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Milieu/pseuds/Milieu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some people were a little more prepared for the end of the world than Andy, but that doesn't mean they're really having a better time of it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Jake

In the days leading up to the Cloud (as unimpressive as that was for the name for the end of all life as we know it, it was what the internet and then the media had latched onto), Jake spent a lot of time on the phone. Texting everyone he knew counted as spending time on the phone. He didn't really have a plan or an idea of what he was trying to accomplish - hearing back from people and getting confirmation that they were indeed still alive and kicking made things a little easier to deal with, he supposed.

The week before a bunch of major cities got hit with some kind of super-weapon was a pretty good time to figure out who you really wanted to hear from, as it turned out. Immediately after getting in touch with his family, Jake messaged the guys. He had a hard time remembering how long it had been since they'd all gone their separate ways - had it been five years yet? - but it felt kind of like trying to locate everyone after a particularly wild night out again. Like nothing had really changed.

Of course, things  _had_ changed. Looming end of the world aside, the five of them were scattered all over. Ashley wasn't even in any town that Jake recognized; if Jake thought that  _he'd_  gotten a little detached from society living alone near Yosemite the last few years, he just had to remember Ashley's constant road-tripping to be reminded that some people just didn't settle down, with people or without them. If he had to guess, he'd put Ashley's last location at somewhere near Death Valley, but he wasn't completely sure. CC and Jinxx were easier to pin down, and both were outside of what had been deemed the "highest-risk" areas for the Cloud, but Jake found that he couldn't be satisfied with just knowing that they were out there somewhere. The idea of sending out a tongue-in-cheek "let's get the band back together, guys" message was enough to bring a smile to his face for a bit, but he meant it. If they were all together again, he'd at least know that everyone was safe.

The first wrench in that plan was convincing everyone to get a move-on right before impending disaster.

The second was Andy.

None of Jake's messages to Andy had gotten a reply. None of the other three had heard from him either. The situation in LA hadn't looked good from what Jake had seen on the various news feeds that he followed, but Andy was smart enough, or at least stubborn enough, to keep from getting caught up in the insanity, right? Jake hoped he was right.

The "convincing" part also turned out to be more difficult than expected. Jinxx was intent on staying with his family for the time being, but promised to make his way over "when things calmed down", which managed to be comforting and worrying at the same time. CC was just too far away and too strapped for resources to come on such short notice, especially with things like gas prices skyrocketing and the occasional area that had declared martial law. The only one he got a definite time frame from was Ashley, and even that wasn't much: a short text that said  _after it hits_ and nothing more. _  
_

So Jake waited. And he cleaned out the spare rooms, and waited, and made sure to stock up on food, and waited, and watched the news, and waited, and waited, until the Cloud came down.

\---

It looked like the world's freakiest dust storm. That was really the most coherent thought Jake could muster on the matter. He could see the edges of it from his upstairs windows, and not for the first time, he was thankful that he spent most of his time up in the mountains. He tried to imagine what it must have looked like in the cities that got hit, whether there had been a blast of some sort or just the Cloud, inevitably descending. The power cut out at one point, and he had to go out back to fire up the back-up generator; when you lived this far away from any urban or even suburban areas, maintenance took obscenely long at the best of times. For all he knew, the electric company had just decided to cut the power out here and nobody would come at all, ever. He didn't bother calling anyone to see.

He watched the news feeds for a while, until what they showed became too much for him or until they went off-air and offline. The bits and pieces of the Cloud's effects that he could pick up were deeply unsettling.

People were getting sick. Of course they were, that was the point. Not everyone, possibly not even a majority of the people caught in the affected areas, but people were getting sick. Nearly as many people who hadn't been in the zones that got hit were freaking out about possible airborne transmission and water contamination. There had already been an exodus from the cities before the Cloud hit. Now the people who had gotten outside or had already been there wanted to quarantine the ones that were left. There were riots. People kept predicting that the military would get involved, but it didn't seem to be happening just yet, if it was going to.

There was no definite answer as to what the sickness even  _was,_ really. Just a list of symptoms.

It was something that sounded like a really bad cross between the flu and a severe food allergy. Severe nausea. Fever and chills. Coma. Brain damage. Sometimes the damage impaired speech and motor skills, sometimes the affected people became violent. Some seemed to come out of the coma stage more or less unscathed. The one constant was the food allergy-slash-flu; people were getting increasingly distraught over the fact that if there was nothing that could lessen the symptoms, those affected would probably get stuck on a liquid diet or something for the rest of their lives or worse.

After the words "zombie apocalypse" started appearing more and more frequently in comments, Jake stopped looking at what was left of the news feeds altogether.

"Hate to be That Guy, but we're having an actual end-of-the-world scenario here, guys." He muttered to himself as he shut down his computer. "Can you, you know, not?"

He didn't really know what to do with himself at that point. He sent out a few messages with short and hopefully not-alarming updates about what he knew, and he got back scattered replies. Still no word from Andy. He tried not to dwell too much on what that might mean.

He stayed awake for probably something like 48 hours after the Cloud first came down, gradually slipping into a kind of stupor, huddled under a blanket on his couch even though it was the middle of summer and watching some foreign movie on one of the news stations that was still running. When his phone chimed unprompted, he nearly jumped out of his skin and knocked the device onto the floor.

The message was from Ashley and its contents set Jake's pulse off even faster.

_heading to LA to get Andy. stay put and we'll come find you._

\---

He didn't hear anything else for almost two weeks.

Two weeks, as it turned out, was a  _long goddamn time._

In that time, Jake managed to both get pretty good at hiking, which he had never really tried before despite spending the last few years pretty much all by himself in the mountains, and to seriously twist his ankle by taking a tumble down a rocky slope. His ankle had more or less healed up after a few days, but the thought of how he could have broken it or something else even more disastrous (like his neck) kept him mostly indoors for a while. Nobody wanted to weather out the apocalypse with a broken bone.

He spent a lot of time playing solitaire, both the card version and the computer version. He broke out his guitar for what was probably the first time in months and played and basked in the nostalgia for a while. He sent out periodic texts, but the responses he received gradually dwindled as people ran out of battery and lost electricity, or cell towers stopped working, or other less pleasant things that might have happened to them. There weren't even any looters or refugees or anything to break up the monotony, with how far out of the way he was.

When the monotony finally did break, it was with very little fanfare. It was probably sometime around one or two in the morning and Jake was still up playing solitaire at his kitchen table because one, why not, and two, he just didn't feel like sleeping. It was increasingly difficult to try and relax when he might as well have been completely isolated from what was left of the rest of the world and was constantly wondering if he would ever have company again.

He didn't recognize the sound for what it was at first. A distant kind of rumbling, he initially passed it off as something like the ringing in his ears that occasionally started up when there was too much silence for too long, or else something happening on the mountains in the distance. It took several minutes and the sudden flash of light through the windows for it to click, and then he nearly overturned the table in his haste to get outside. He had the bizarre urge to grin, flooded with relief.

His elation was tempered somewhat when he saw how the motorcycle was swerving all over the road and he hurried down the drive. "Ashley! Ash, slow down!" There was no sign of whether Ashley heard him or not, but he was beginning to roll to a shaky stop. When he managed to come to a full halt, he fell off of the bike more than dismounted it, narrowly avoiding having it fall on top of him. The gym bag slung over his back was partially unzipped and a few packages of food and some things that looked like surgical masks spilled out of as Ashley tried to get back to his feet.

Jake noted with a sinking feeling that Ashley was very much alone.

\---

Jake was familiar with the term "shell-shock", but he hadn't ever thought that he'd actually see something like it until Ashley's helmet came off. Whatever he'd encountered on his way to Los Angeles and then up here had done a number on him, if his somewhat vacant expression and the time it took for him to really notice that Jake was there were any indication. He had one of the surgical masks (or maybe they were the kind that construction workers wore when working with plaster or something, Jake didn't really know the difference) on underneath his helmet, though it had come loose and was hanging from one ear. Jake brushed it off onto the ground without much care. Ashley's mouth opened and closed a few times, like he was trying to say something, but he ended up just clinging onto Jake's sleeve with one hand and the gym bag with the other as Jake half-carried him up to the house.

"Jesus Christ, how long have you been driving? You look like hell. You could have told me you were close and stopped somewhere down the road and I would have come to get you..." It had been ages since Jake had talked to anyone face-to-face, and he found himself babbling as he got Ashley and his bag settled on the couch. For his part, Ashley didn't do much to respond and instead mostly just sat there looking exhausted. Jake couldn't blame him, but it made figuring anything out about their situation difficult. It was hard not to just ask a million questions - where was Andy? Had he not actually made it to LA? Had he heard from anyone else? What was going on in the cities now? Ashley slumped against the arm of the couch and closed his eyes, and Jake would have thought that he'd passed out if not for the vice grip that he still had on the strap of the bag.

"What do you have in there?" was the question that Jake finally settled on. He tried to ease the strap out of Ashley's hand, but he refused to lessen his grip. Jake gave up, left kneeling on the floor next to the couch and uncertain what to do with himself now. This wasn't the reunion he'd been hoping for, as horribly selfish as he felt for even thinking that. He was very aware that he'd been able to ride out the disasters so far in relative safety and comfort, and Ashley clearly hadn't had that privilege. But... Jesus. How was he  _supposed_ to feel when the first actual person that he'd seen face-to-face in weeks was practically comatose as soon as they met?

After a few minutes passed in uneasy silence, Jake tried again to get Ashley's attention. "Are you hungry?" As an afterthought he added, "When was the last time you ate?"

Ashley opened his eyes at that, focusing unsteadily on Jake for the first time. "...Dunno." His voice was raspy.

"I have some chicken noodle soup. You sound like you could use some." Jake stood with a quiet groan, feeling encouraged now that he was actually getting a response.

Ashley lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. Jake's mouth creased into a frown again. "Ash. Talk to me. Do something other than sit there like a zombie. Please."

Ashley's eyelids had been drooping again, but they snapped wide open at something that Jake had said. He sat up more, not looking at Jake but rather at a spot on the wall to his left, looking like he was thinking hard about something. Jake glanced over his shoulder to see if there was actually anything over there to look at (there wasn't), sighed, and went to the kitchen to open a few cans of soup. He thought he heard Ashley say something to himself but couldn't make it out over the noise of the can opener.

It sounded like "zombies".

\---

Jake opted to put a bowl of soup on a tray and bring it in to Ashley instead of trying to coerce him up off of the couch again. Ashley looked troubled but more awake and aware, at least, and he accepted the tray with a muttered thanks. His hands shook a bit while he ate, occasionally letting drops of soup fall onto the tray, but he ate the entire thing. Jake felt curiously relieved, and couldn't put his finger on why that was.

Ashley still wasn't very inclined to talk after finishing his meal and gave no indication of intending to move off the couch, so Jake decided to just bring him down a pillow and blanket. "Bathroom's down the hall if you want to change clothes..."

"I'm fine." Ashley had kicked off his boots and slid out of his jacket. Jake had half-expected him to root through the gym bag, which he had moved to the floor, for some fresh clothes but he didn't. Jake supposed that nothing tucked away in the bag would have really been any cleaner than what Ashley already had on, after two continuous weeks of traveling.

"Well. There's stuff in the kitchen if you get hungry again, and my room's upstairs if you need anything else."

"Okay." Ashley slid under the blanket without saying anything else.

"Well... good night, I guess." Jake glanced out the window and swore under his breath when he saw sunlight peeking over the edge of the horizon. "Or good morning, or whatever."

Ashley didn't respond. Jake sighed and trudged up to bed.

\---

It was past noon when he woke up, and he'd have probably slept longer if not for the sound of his shower running. He laid in bed for a while and let his thoughts wander. Ashley getting up and around on his own was a good thing, at least. Possibly the only good thing that would happen that day, but maybe he could afford to be hopeful. Maybe Ashley hadn't even made it to LA. Maybe he'd chosen to turn around and head up here on his own instead. Maybe Andy and CC and Jinxx were all totally fine and off doing their own thing wherever they were.

Maybe he'd just wake up and find that all of this had been a very long, terrible dream. 

After a while, he glanced at the clock and realized that Ashley had been in the shower for at least forty-five minutes and that he hadn't heard any noise to indicate that Ashley was actually moving around in there. He rolled out of bed and shuffled over to knock on the door. "Ashley? You okay in there?"

No response. Jake was torn between feeling worried and annoyed, but he took a deep breath and told himself to be patient with Ashley. Harassing him when he was a half-mute, traumatized wreck wasn't going to get them anywhere good. He tried the doorknob and found it locked. "If you don't answer me, I'm going to come in there and get you."

"I'm fine." Ashley's voice was muffled by the running water. Jake wanted to think that he sounded at least marginally better than he had last night.

"Okay, well, I'm going to make breakfast. Do you want anything?"

"I'll just have whatever you make."

"Alright." Jake tried to come up with something else to say in order to elicit some kind of reply other than the flat, noncommittal answers he was currently getting, but came up blank. "Just come down to the kitchen when you're done, then." He got more silence back as an answer.

Halfway through preparing breakfast, he discovered that he'd run out of milk. He usually made the half-hour trip into town to stock up on groceries every few weeks; right now, it had been closer to a month since he last went out any significant distance from the house. Jake wondered if it would be worth the effort to try and drag Ashley along with him if he decided to make the trip that day. He had enough food left to probably last them another day or two, but he'd have to go sometime and he wasn't keen on leaving Ashley all by himself for hours on end in the state he was in. And frankly, he didn't want to go back to being so alone either.

Ashley eventually made his way downstairs, presumably having stayed in the shower until the hot water ran out. He took a seat at the table without greeting Jake, looking subdued.

"I hope you're in the mood for oatmeal," Jake said, setting a bowl in front of him, "because that's about all we've got right now."

Ashley grunted and picked up the spoon to eat without further comment. Jake bit back a sigh and sat down with his own bowl. They ate in silence, save for the sound of their silverware clinking. Jake watched Ashley out of the corner of his eye, to try and gauge how he was holding up. Ashley glanced at him once, quickly looking away again when their eyes met. There were still shadows under his eyes, despite how long they'd both slept.

 _What did you see on the way up here, Ash? What the hell did you_ see?

"Do you have a lighter or matches?" Ashley said abruptly.

Jake took a moment to answer, caught off-guard by Ashley initiating the conversation. "Yeah, why?"

"There's some stuff in my bag that I need to burn."

That... answered pretty much none of Jake's questions and actually left him with quite a few more. "Stuff you need to burn."

"It's contaminated."

"Okay..." More understandable. Between the wind blowing Cloud-dust, or whatever you wanted to call it, out of the cities and the distance that Ashley had had to drive, it made sense that he'd probably gone through some areas of questionable safety. Jake recalled the surgical mask that Ashley had been wearing underneath his helmet and the ones that had spilled out of the bag.

Ashley pushed his empty bowl away and stood. "I'm just going to take it out back and burn it, if that's okay."

"That's fine. I'll get the lighter for you." Jake got up to go dig through the closet where he kept the lighter and fire-starters; up in the mountains, the winters were a bit colder than one would typically expect for California, and he liked to have a fire going sometimes. When he went out back, Ashley had already located a patch of dirt that was relatively free of dry plant material and was busy emptying out his gym bag. He set the packaged food, some bottles of water, and a bundle of clothes aside, and removed what appeared to be another bundle of clothes that had been wrapped in several plastic grocery bags. Ashley donned one of the surgical masks and insisted that Jake put one on too. It occurred to Jake to wonder if the masks alone would be enough to protect them from whatever possible contaminants they were going to be burning or if they should worry about their eyes too, but he kept it to himself. It wasn't like he had a welding mask or anything that could double as safety goggles anyway. No point in potentially getting Ashley worked up about it if there was nothing they could do.

Ashley carefully unwrapped the clothes and dropped them on the dirt, and held the lighter to the edge of the fabric until it caught. He stepped back next to Jake to watch the pile burn. There wasn't much wind that day so the smoke spiraled straight up, saving them from having to worry about it blowing into the house. Ashley didn't seem especially torn up about having to burn his clothes, but Jake wasn't sure if that was a good or bad thing. He hadn't exactly been an emotionless robot so far, but seeing someone who was normally so animated and energetic act so detached was unnerving.

Ashley put his remaining packages of food in Jake's pantry and the bottled water in the fridge once they were back inside. Seeing that he probably wasn't going to offer any kind of context or further explanation for what had just happened all on his own, Jake decided to get to the bottom of things himself, for better or worse.

"So you drove through one of the zones."

Ashley gave him a sidelong glance. "Yeah."

Because of course nothing could ever be easy. "The wind must have been pretty bad, to blow stuff all the way up to 395."

Ashley averted his eyes again. "395 was alright. Most of the stuff had... dissipated, or whatever, by the time I got to it."

Jake knew where this was going. He knew exactly where the hell this was going and it was the last place he had ever wanted to go, but good god he had to get there. "So you made it to LA."

Ashley turned and gave him a thin, tight-lipped smile that didn't reach his eyes, and Jake's blood ran cold.

"Yeah," Ashley said finally, "I made it."


	2. Ashley

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bet you weren't expecting THIS to get updated, were you.
> 
> This chapter has some non-linear narration, so please let me know if it's too hard to follow and I'll try to fix things up as best I can.
> 
> Temperance is a completely made-up little town. If it turns out there is an actual town of Temperance somewhere in California and I have happened to completely misrepresent it, then wow, what a coincidence. Also sorry.

Ashley spent the apocalypse in a storm cellar with a bunch of college hippies that he had never met before. Every half hour or so, one of them would start to light up a joint or something and Ashley would give them a dirty look and tell them to put that shit away because he did not want to survive a super-weapon only to suffocate on someone's pot smoke. They would him a dirty look in exchange and put it out, only for someone else to eventually light up and start the whole cycle over again. It was not exactly the most glamorous day of Ashley's life, is the point.

Every so often, he would check his phone. There was no signal down here, so he just scrolled through older messages; his family, the friends whose couch he'd been crashing on for the last week or so before the news broke, Jake. Jake's messages were by far the longest and most involved, trying to piece together some sort of plan. He wanted the five of them to meet up, somehow. Ashley had been all for that, but there was the issue of actually trying to get to where Jake was with all of the roadblocks and martial law and displaced people in between. He'd sent back a simple message the day before:  _after it hits._  About the furthest thing from an ideal schedule that he could give, but it was the best he could do.

All he could do now was listen to the wind howling outside and wonder if Jake had heard anything else from the others yet. The last update Jake had given him, he still hadn't heard from Andy. None of them brought up the fact that Los Angeles was one of the first cities to start evacuating, or the first to start having riots and looters. It was like they were all hoping that if they didn't acknowledge it, everything would be fine and Andy would just show up at some point, going  _what, were you guys really that worried about me? Of course I'm fine._

The light on their battery-powered lantern was starting to flicker, and the noise outside was showing no signs of letting up. Ashley sighed and powered his phone down to conserve the battery before returning it to his pocket. The light was probably going to go out before the storm - the Cloud, one of the hippies had told him it was being called - let up, and he didn't want his battery to die if he needed his phone's light for something. He sighed and laid back on the concrete floor, one arm behind his head.

Of all the ways Ashley had imagined that the end of the world might be described, he hadn't ever expected it to be  _boring_.

\---

The lantern's light finally sputtered and died a couple hours later. The noises outside hadn't changed to any noticeable degree. It was like waiting out the most relentless tornado in history, if the tornado just sat on top of you and whirled instead of throwing things around.

Not five minutes after the light went out, a lighter on the other end of the storm cellar flickered on. Ashley scowled in the lighter's direction, though the person holding it probably couldn't see his face.

"Will you cut that shit out?"

The offender grumbled something about Ashley being a square ( _Wow,_ was the only thought Ashley could muster in response to that) and put it out. Now that he thought about it, actually, they might just be pissy at him because he'd insisted on dragging his bike down into the storm shelter with them and a few of them kept bumping into it. A few bruised elbows were fair penance for keeping his only mode of transportation safe, in his opinion. Besides, that motorcycle was his baby. He wasn't leaving it out to the mercy of the elements and whatever kind of weapon was being dropped on them.

Another lighter flicked on. Ashley stared up into the darkness and wondered if maybe he actually had died at some point before the Cloud hit, and now he was just stuck in the most tedious of all hells.

\---

He must have fallen asleep at some point, because eventually there was a shaft of light from the open cellar doors and one of the college students shaking him and telling him to get up, that it was over. He sat up and groaned at the stiffness of his muscles, and resolved to never again sleep on a concrete floor if he could help it. After stretching and rolling his shoulders to try and work out some of the stiffness, he got to work dragging his bike up the steps and outside.

Everything looked so normal that it was actually a bit disconcerting. If Ashley hadn't known any better, he could have thought that they had just been waiting out a run-of-the-mill windstorm near the desert. The house nearby and the college hippies' van (because of course they had a van) was covered in sand and dust, but mostly unharmed. One of them immediately got to work on cleaning the van off so they could get inside and see if it would start. Ashley stayed near the cellar entrance, glancing around. He fished his phone out of his pocket and turned it on to see if he'd gotten any new messages, but the signal was still too poor even above-ground for anything to come through. Clearly, he needed to get to someplace that actually resembled civilization if he wanted to be able to get his bearings and figure out his next move.

He looked over at the students, who had huddled around their van. No less than three of them had proceeded to whip out their joints and light up as soon as they saw the light of day. Expecting them to be any kind of useful was probably just going to bring him irritation and disappointment, but what other choice did he have right now?

"Hey," he called over, "do you guys know what the next town is and how far it is from here?"

"It's Temperance," the student who was trying to get the van to start responded. "It's a few miles down the road. That's where we were heading next, if you wanna follow along. My grandparents live there."

Ashley wasn't especially keen on spending any more time with a bunch of stoners than absolutely necessary, but if he rolled into town with a bunch of kids that the residents actually knew, they might be less inclined to kick him back out in an apocalypse-fueled fit of paranoia. "Sure, lead the way."

\---

Temperance, the nearest billboard proclaimed, was "The Most Welcoming Community in California!!", presumably to make up for the fact that it was located in the ass-end of nowhere right next to Death Valley. Ashley was having a hard time taking it seriously already, and they hadn't even reached the city limits yet. He just had to hope that the residents lived up to the billboard's claim and would let him stock up on supplies before he set out on the road again.

He did get some suspicious looks, mostly from older residents, but he didn't get thrown out or accused of being a devil worshipper, which was admittedly better treatment than he'd gotten in some of the small towns that the band had passed through back when they were touring. The thought of those cross-country trips - long days and longer nights, crammed into a bus with at least five other people but having the time of his life - sent an unexpected flood of nostalgia through him.

It was as he was standing there in the sole Walmart boasted by Temperance, lost in thoughts of the past, that a plan clicked together in his head. It was all so simple, he didn't know why it hadn't occurred to him before.

Ashley set out from Temperance, California (population 1,200, said the sign, but Ashley was pretty sure that was an exaggeration), with a duffel bag full of food, bottled water, and a stock of surgical masks that had been foisted upon him by one of the stoners "just in case", and left just one message in his wake.

_heading to LA to get Andy. stay put and we'll come find you._

_\---_

The surgical masks reeked of pot smoke, because of course they did. Ashley left them untouched in his bag for most of the trip to LA, until he got close enough to see the clouds gathering on the horizon.

They were certainly clouds, rather than the Cloud that he'd waited out a few days earlier, but they were... off. Ashley was no stranger to the sight of smog, how it hung low over the cities on particularly bad days, but this was different. It was probably just his lingering nerves from everything that had been going on for the past few weeks and the worry about Andy's lack of response that he'd been more or less successfully repressing up until now, but...

Well. He supposed he could endure the smell of pot for an hour or two.

\---

About twenty minutes out from the Los Angeles city limits, Ashley passed his first abandoned car.

The hazard lights were still flashing, so he came to a stop as he pulled up next to the car. It took only a quick survey of the scene, however, to determine that no one was in or around the vehicle. There was a tennis shoe about two feet away, just lying there like someone had kicked it off. No other signs besides the car itself that people had been there at all recently. No sign of trouble besides a fist-sized impact on the windshield that had sent cracks spiderwebbing across its surface.

In whole, Ashley was only stopped for a few minutes looking over the car. His uneasiness only grew, though, and just kept getting stronger as he passed the city limits.

\---

Once he reached LA proper, he had to slow his motorcycle to a crawl thanks to all the mess in the streets. Once, he had to stop completely so he could dismount and walk his bike around a wreck (no people about, just like the stopped car on the highway) but mostly he just inched through and avoided debris.

Even though he didn't see anyone, there was a prickling on the back of his neck and the irrational certainty that he wasn't alone.

There was a palpable feeling of relief when he reached Andy's neighborhood.

It didn't last.

\---

"And then...?"

Jake's voice brought Ashley back to reality, making him aware that he'd trailed off again and was staring at the surface of Jake's kitchen table instead of talking.

"What happened?" There was a note of dread mixed with resignation in Jake's voice. Ashley couldn't bring himself to look up and see it written on his face as well.

"I don't remember," he said finally. Jake had clearly already guessed where this was going. They both knew, so why did he have to say it and make it real?

"Bullshit." There was no venom in it, but Ashley still flinched. He didn't want to say any more. His throat was closing up, physically trying to stop him from saying it.

Instead, he said, "It took me so long to get back up here because the roads are bad. Cars and shit everywhere. I drove through..." He stopped again.

That night, the accident, the  _faces_ -

\---

_-faces in the moonlight, gaunt and wide-eyed, the car left on the side of the road with one door standing open and the hazards blinking, faces waiting there like-_

_Like it was intentional._

_Like they knew someone would stop._

_Of course they knew._

_God, he almost had. He'd slowed down like he was going to, the first time he would have stopped since he gunned it out of LA and came to veering all over the road, hands shaking, couldn't stop shaking-_

_Andy-_

_It was gut instinct and fear that saved him that night, rather than intelligence or determination._

_He slowed just enough, was just able to see for a split second, and then before he could even put it together he was gunning the engine again and there was a hand grabbing at the leg of his jeans and he kicked out blindly, felt it connect, felt a crunch, and then he was doing 70, 80, 90, pushing the bike as hard and as far as it could go and at some point he was aware that he was screaming-_

_He kept screaming until he crashed._

\---

_When he came to again, he managed to wrestle his helmet off but wasn't able to get rid of the mask before he threw up._

_It was nothing short of a miracle that he was alive, much less relatively uninjured. He mused on that as much as his shaken mind could handle as he tossed the now vomit-covered mask away and sucked in deep breaths of air. Wait out the apocalypse in a fucking storm cellar full of pot smoke, drive hours to one of the centers of attack without incident, crash his fucking bike, and he came out of it all okay._

_Well, physically he was okay._

_Ashley pulled another mask out of his bag and fit it on before replacing his helmet and limping to his overturned motorcycle. Miracle of miracles, the bike was okay too, if a little dinged and scraped up._

_He had to drive more carefully from then on, avoid cars, avoid anything that looked like it was inhabited if he couldn't tell who - or what - was there._

\---

Ashley was aware that Jake was staring at him, expression deeply troubled. He kept tapping his fingers on his leg, like he desperately needed something to do with his hands. Ashley kept his own hands in his lap and focused on them.

"That's-" Jake started to say, and then stopped himself. There was any number of things he could have added after that.  _That's fucked up. That's not possible. That's not the kind of end-of-the-world scenario we're living in, Ash._

But what other explanation was there? It _was_ the end of the world. All bets were off.

Ashley's hands had started shaking again. He clasped them together to try and make it stop.

The silence stretched on long past the point of comfortable (not that any part of this conversation had been comfortable) before Jake spoke up again.

"But what about Andy?"

Ashley let out a slow, shuddering breath. Closed his eyes, turned away.

"Ashley." There was a plea there. _Prove me wrong,_ it said. _Please, please, say something to prove me wrong._

"I-" That was all Ashley was able to force out before he felt his eyes pricking, his throat tightening again. Saying it out loud made it the only option. The only reality they were allowed to have.

Ashley brought one hand up and bit down on his knuckle, hard, to try and bring himself back under control. His body wasn't having it, though; he was shaking again, breath hitching almost into sobs, and goddammit, this wasn't how things were supposed to be, it was so unfair.

Jake's arm came around his shoulders and Ashley finally let himself collapse.

"I think he probably killed himself." His voice came out in a hoarse whisper. He rubbed at his eyes, but there were tears there now and they wouldn't go away no matter how he tried. "I couldn't... I took too long. I should have gotten there sooner." He curled in on himself and against Jake, lost, exhausted.

"No," Jake said, and there was no way of telling if he meant that it wasn't Ashley's fault or if he was denying everything.

This wasn't how things were supposed to be.

"I should have gone as soon as we got the news. We could have gotten the hell out of there with everyone else, we would have been fine-" Ashley's voice broke and he couldn't stop himself now. Jake was talking to him again, but it didn't matter. Nothing mattered. The world was ending and he'd had one chance to make a difference in how it went down, and he'd gone and fucked it up.

Just a day or two earlier. That was all he'd have needed.

\---

 _Just a day or two earlier, and the car in the driveway wouldn't have been smashed up with Andy's CD's littering the pavement. The door wouldn't have been standing wide open, making Ashley's heart drop sickly into his stomach because no matter what he tried to tell himself, he only had to take one look at the state of the house and he_ knew-

_"Andy?"_

_The broken windows, the missing things, the overturned furniture. The empty bottles that he kicked through as he made his way to the upended couch._

_"Andy, it's me, Ashley."_

_The long, pale arm stretching out from underneath it, palm upraised like a plea for help, blue veins and black ink standing out against the skin._

_Ashley didn't know how long he stood there, seeing but not seeing, unable to form any thoughts but "no no no no no NO NO NONONONO-" and then he was running away, stumbling into the doorframe and jarring his shoulder, out into the overcast evening, one of the CD cases in the driveway cracking under the heel of his boot as he threw himself out to the street and onto his bike and he wouldn't stop shaking and crying until everything was in a fog and the outside world only broke through periodically._

_Just one day earlier._

_Just one day, you fucking idiot, and you could have fixed everything._

\---

This wasn't how things were supposed to be.

Jake watched helplessly as Ashley cried himself out until he was exhausted, unable to do anything but rub his back and try to think of something, anything to say. Not that anything seemed to be getting through to him right now.

Fuck.  _Fuck._

Somewhere, in some deep, dark part of himself that he didn't acknowledge, he'd suspected. Maybe even realized. But he'd hoped against hope, clung to the possibility as long and as tightly as he could, that they'd be able to at least pretend things were going to be okay.

"We'll think of something," he whispered to nobody in particular. He didn't even know what he meant by that. But they  _had_ to do something. He and Ashley couldn't just sit up in his house forever.

Especially since "forever" had abruptly gotten a whole lot shorter than it used to be.


End file.
